Or if you missed them, the below post gives you a sum-up, including a transcript of the presentation between pieces. As a reminder, programs and videos of all our past concerts can be viewed at this “past concerts” page. We started last weekend’s concerts with Haydn (printed program here).

Joseph Haydn – Trio for clarinet, violin and violoncello in B flat major
1 Allegro 2 Adagio 3 Minuetto-Trio 4 Presto

The mission of UP CLOSE AND CLASSICAL is to make chamber music more accessible. We have often said in our concerts that chamber music is a conversation about musical ideas. To express ideas, form matters. And to explain musical form, an analogy with language can be helpful.  

In our languages, ideas can be expressed in an email, or in a book. The email and the book are different literary forms which make different demands on both writer and readers.

In music, a three-minute song and a four-movement classical piece are different musical forms, with different demands on composers, performers and listeners.

The Haydn work we heard had four movements, written at the CLASSICAL period, when composers were seeking the meaning of wordless music. As a child, Haydn was a singer, and he taught himself composition using a language* that used the relationship between CONSONANCE and DISSONANCE very much the way vocal music did (* Josef Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum comes to mind).

Short digression about the relationship between words and music.  Words have meaning, but musical phrases have meaning too. When forming a song, the composer typically puts the music fully in service of the lyrics. But music can carry its own meaning too. Hearing “Happy birthday” on the tune of the Star-spangled banner, or the reverse: “O say can you see” on the Happy birthday tune, shows that we can separate the meaning of music from that of words. In our simple example, the meaning was given to these tunes by social convention, but could not wordless music have inherent meaning too?

We can see the development of chamber music in the classical period as an effort to answer that question. Which brings us back to Haydn. The relationship between CONSONANCE and DISSONANCE inherited from vocal music was then formalized as tonal music theory, with polarity between a TONIC, and a DOMINANT limiting the use of dissonances as “accidental” or “passing”.

The 19th century saw a continuation of that effort, researching the meaning of PURE MUSIC. New instruments, like the PIANO, progressively strained the relationship to the system of classic tonality. Per the definition of “consonance” Josef Fux used, the equal-tempered tuning of an 88-key piano is “dissonant”. And the role of dissonances in music changed. 

By 1939, in “POETICS OF MUSIC”, Igor STRAWINSKY wrote:

The superannuated system of classic tonality, which has served as the basis for musical constructions of compelling interest, has had the authority of law among musicians for only a short period of time a period much shorter than is usually imagined, extending only from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth.(…) Modality, tonality, polarity are merely provisional means that are passing by, and will even pass away. What survives every change of system is melody. The masters of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance were no less concerned over melody than were Bach and Mozart.

Our language analogy is imperfect, but helpful to accept the meaning inherent to music: using the lingusitics work of Noam Chomsky, Leonard Bernstein used in 1973 the following analogies: melody as noun, harmony as adjectives and rhythm as verb. (To view Bernstein demonstrating, see 3 minutes between 15:40 to 18:40 of This video )

HANS GAL had a gift for MELODY, and he was in love with vocal music. This love is reflected in this serenade, written in 1930. In every movement, a clearly identifiable melody is our anchor, but the harmonies (adjectives) use more dissonances than Haydn. Also the rhythmic vocabulary (verbs) is very different from what we heard in Haydn.

Hans Gàl had a brillant career as an opera composer and educator in Germany, in the 1920’s until 1933, and one of the conductors he worked with frequently was FRITZ BUSCH. The BUSCH family (5 brothers Violinist, Cellist, Conductor, composer and actor) was very prominent in German music, but they were also very much anti-Nazi, and like Hans Gàl, emigrated. But they also loved German culture and Adolf Busch composed these German dances. Adolf Busch was a top violinist but declared that he would have wanted to be an organist.

INGOLF DAHL was twenty years younger than Hans Gàl. For the performances of his Concerto a Tre, he provided us program notes (see in program).
To understand his notes, let us return to Leonard Bernstein and his analogy of language.
The manipulation that Dahl talks about can be understood with the idea of SYNTAX. Bernstein uses the “deep structure” JACK loves JILL with different surface structures: passive, negative, interrogative. (To view Bernstein demonstrating, see 3 1/2 minutes between 29:45 to 33:15 of This same video we saw earlier )
WHY? Stravinsky in POETICS OF MUSIC explains that without obstacle there is no freedom for the composer (see below). These obstacles help the movement, as narrow walls could help us out of a pit. The limitation that DAHL puts on himself with the “thematic germ” is what unleashes the creativity of the composer.

Excerpt of Strawinsky’s “Poetics in Music”, translated in English by Ingolf Dahl (both are in the picture below).

My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Thanks again for coming to our concerts, and reading that far… Hervé